Monthly Archives: June 2006

Taking on copyright abusers

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This morning’s Observer column…

This year, Bloomsday was marked in somewhat different ways. In Dublin, the festivities were cancelled because of the state funeral of Charlie Haughey, the former Taoiseach. Such restraint was entirely out of character with the spirit of Bloomsday, for Haughey was as colourful a rogue as any encountered by Leopold Bloom on his perambulations on the day in 1904 on which the novel is set. The correct thing to do would have been to infiltrate the obsequies, thereby highlighting the absurdity of a political establishment seeking to pretend that Haughey had been somehow a statesman of note.

The failure of Joycean nerve in Dublin was, however, offset by a laudable display of spunk in California, where Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University filed a legal suit against James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, in a US district court, accusing the administrator of the writer’s estate of ‘copyright misuse’.

Given that the entire publishing world has been legally intimidated by Stephen Joyce for decades, this is a landmark action. And the case will be followed with interest in every jurisdiction in which works on James Joyce are published….

WorldCat

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Wow! Something I should have known about — Worldcat.

WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.

I’ve just used it to look up a rare book and it told me which libraries in my part of the world have a copy.

China now blocks main Google site

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I missed this BBC NEWS report (dated June 7), and only picked it up when reading Owen’s Blog…

Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.

Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google’s international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.

But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.

The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.

“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

“Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” the organisation said…

It was only a matter of time, of course. But it makes the Google boys look even more naive than I had thought.

House of the rising son

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Cory Doctorow is leaving London for a year. He’s off to LA to write a book. Walking through Cambridge yesterday I passed a lovely 17th century house in Northampton Street and thought it would make a perfect residence for the great campaigner when he returns.

US ill-prepared for Net disruption?

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From WSJ.com…

The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.

The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.

“It’s a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility,” said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable’s Internet-security effort.
Other companies with leaders active in the effort include FedEx Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., CA Inc., Alcoa Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

The study points out that a massive Web disruption could potentially paralyze banks, transportation systems, health-care providers and voice calling over the Internet.

The chief problem: There are so many public and private institutions that handle security-related tasks that their responsibilities often overlap, creating inefficiencies that can bog down an emergency response, according to the study.
Security officials at some banks and other companies have established groups to swap data about Internet threats. Companies that make the technology behind the Internet itself have an informal group of their own to discuss security issues. Meanwhile, a government body called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group is meant to manage a response to Internet emergencies.

Yet those groups’ roles are often unclear, and no system is in place to coordinate their efforts, the study says. It cited “serious problems stemming from the lack of consolidation, including the fact that these organizations are not accountable for their actions.”

Surprise, surprise: planet is hotting up

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From Environment News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, June 22, 2006 (ENS) – The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.

The 155 page report provides additional evidence that “human activities are responsible for much of the warming,” the authors said.

The study, written by a panel of 12 climate experts, assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for the Earth over approximately the last 2,000 years.

Widespread reliable instrument records of global temperatures are available only for the last 150 years, leaving scientists to estimate past climatic conditions by analyzing proxy evidence from sources such as tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers.

Committee chair Gerald North said the panel’s review of instrument and proxy data affords “a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”

Cheese!

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An astonishing proportion of the Japanese tourists who visit Cambridge want to be photographed against the backdrop of the apple tree in front of Trinity College. Wonder if this is because of the legend about Newton and the apple? (His rooms overlook the lawn on which an apple tree stands.)

Which reminds me of one of my favourite cartoons. It shows Newton sitting under the tree, rubbing a bump on his head. He is looking meditatively at the offending fruit lying at his feet and saying: “Now comes the difficult bit — getting a research grant to write it up”.